“When men have once experienced defeat, they are not willing to maintain the same ideas about facing the same dangers.” Ironically, that truism was never more valid than after the Athenian calamity in Sicily; the Athenians became as paralyzed with fear as the Spartans had been over a decade earlier after their own debacle on Pylos. Immediately the Athenians lost their confidence at sea. For the first time in two decades they systematically began to lose ships to the newly constructed Peloponnesian fleet. For two years, imperial seamen were fearful of battle altogether, until the victory at
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